By Sharon Li

From my dad to Frat dad

After dad dropped me off around 9 p.m., the pre-Lunt shenanigans had already begun. After shuffling around a bit, attending to this and that, sipping this and that, we linked our sweatered arms and mitten sheathed hands and skipped across campus, gaining and losing in numbers along the way as we made several pit stops.

By the time we’d arrived, the basement seemed pretty sapped of the usual ready-to-break-shit-and-dance-on-rainbows energy. A lot of the usually numerous Lunt crowd opted for the various other parties going on around everywhere else. Making my way through this comparatively barren basement of hands tossing back cans and hey-how-are-ya’s, catching wafts of busy chattering from the café, I found the beat up couches where friends gathered and mingled, the Psychedelic Horseshit’s tour-tag-alongs dabbling along and making conversation. Then, I learned I’d already missed Frat Dad and had arrived on time for the intermission between them and Psychedelic Horseshit.

Oops, I missed the band

So, big fail, I missed Frat Dad. However, based on what a number of others had to say about it, it sounded like an eardrum-tearing ruckus of garage-y tunes to which some people danced to, some stood and listened, and were for the most part “pretty into it,” but also, based on a few other accounts, “not really into it.” I guess it’s fair to say they were pretty so-so good. Frat Dad are a garage punk duo from Ridgewood, New Jersey with a recently released debut 7”. Their music, from what I heard off YouTube videos of past shows, sounds garage-y, melodic, and chaotically noisy, kind of like what a soundtrack to that epic after-school-on-the-bus-going-home-pranking-and-throwing-things-around-with-your-friends mischief would sound like. It was loud enough that concert-goers’ ears were ringing from the beginning through past the end of the set. The roaring guitars and erratic drums growled loudly, overpowering the singers’ voices so that they were barely audible over all the noise.

Horseshittin’ mind boggling and fun times

After the intermission ended and the band members finished adjusting their toys, it was time for the main act. I didn’t know what to expect with their name, Psychedelic Horseshit, and the singer’s haircut that seemed to have been the craft of a hallucinating teenager holding a razor and crowned his head in a haphazard tangle. The band rumbled into their set, a discordant frazzled mess of garage-y strums sprinkled with oddly placed synths and outlandish sounds that spazzled around randomly. The psychedelic band from Columbus, Ohio, was raring to party as they urged us to pass around the Jack Daniel’s and tinkered around with their crazy sounds.

One song reminded me of a kooky day at the zoo with all the animals sort of flipping out in their cages. At the time, I was sitting in the little recess behind the windows behind the couches with a few friends and we listened to the music as it streamed in muffled through the slightly cracked gaps of the windows and knocked and rattled through our ears. Some students weren’t too enthused, the crowd again consisted of more standers than dancers, but understandably since the music, though sometimes melodic, was often too awkward to dance to without worrying about looking like all your bones suddenly switched places or something drastically physically disabling like that. The undertone beats worked well, yet were lost under all the jangly racket. Another song reminded us of taking a train ride through a creepy wonderland watching all sorts of crazy things going on outside the windows. As the band went through a series of such curiously eccentric songs, we continued to try to put our fingers on what the music sounded like. Some songs carried enough of a melody that some of the crowd was dancing. Apparently, the crowd was more enthused and eager to dance compared to the previous band. When we opened the window, the sudden loudness blasted into our faces like a swarm of mini-demon-guys charging in with their little fists. We looped our legs through the window and climbed back into the crowd where I joined a few friends and we bobbed along to the music for a bit before saying farewell to each other in a manner that seemed a little too mid-seizure-like. The set seemed to end abruptly in a way that rendered it pretty un-memorable. I left Lunt feeling pretty whatever about the whole show, and with that began wandering off around people and trees.

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